22 January 2007
The Community Needs To Hold Software and Web Companies To a Higher Standard
I’m really really sick of piss poor applications being distributed and more importantly represented by corporations. I think the enterprise space is the largest culprit here. So many applications do the bare minimum. If Apple had not released the Macintosh, we would have been content with a non-gui interface. Innovation drives society, and so many companies try to get away by doing the bare minimum or not innovating just “because they can”. One example is Blackboard, an online Learning Management System (LMS). This product is a piss poor user experience. Navigating the software as a teacher, and also as a student is a joke. The interface is 1997 happy. Somehow this company gets away with charging universities millions of dollars a year. If I were a VC, I would invest right now in a team that could innovate like madmen in this space. Besides the PR On-Demand Solutions space, I think the LMS space is a place that an incumbent with horrible usability, design, and a lack of innovation can be destroyed. To make matters worse, great tools like the Yahoo User Interface library is available FREE OF F’N CHARGE. In closing, I’m going to leave a list of standards that users and customers should start holding companies to:
- Usability
- Design
- Innovation
- Customer Support
- Holding conversations with their community
- Giving back to the community in the form of education and development resources (OPEN UP YOUR APIS).
Technorati Tags: blackboard, publictivity, web 2.0, lms, usability, higher standards, apple, macintosh, mac, yui, yahoo ui, yahoo developer network
